Artist Sophie Mak-Schram opens their latest exhibition, To Shift a Stone, as part of Perspective(s), a bold arts programme which reimagines Welsh history, challenges historical narratives and amplifies overlooked voices. This two-part exhibition is the outcome of two years of collaboration with Amgueddfa Cymru and Chapter Arts Centre.
Opening at National Museum Cardiff on 14 June 2025 and at Chapter Arts Centre on 13 September 2025, the two-part exhibition explores how power is experienced, shared, and challenged within museums and cultural spaces.
Working in collaboration with activists, community workers, artists and staff from across both organisations, Sophie has developed a range of collaborative ‘tools’ that challenge and reimagine power structures. These tools range from access templates and new working processes to modified megaphones, ceramics and sound pieces. A selection of these ‘tools’ will be on show as part of To Shift a Stone, encouraging visitors to critically engage with how they relate to cultural institutions, culture and power.
At National Museum Cardiff, the exhibition considers how objects are collected and identified, whose voice can be heard when speaking about these objects, and how to interrupt some of the hidden rules of the museum.
At Chapter Arts Centre, a new exhibition and artwork in the entrance and café will get visitors thinking about how and where people can gather, who they can meet, and what helps them do it in different ways.
The exhibitions feature new commissioned work by Sophie and collaborators, alongside key items from across the museum’s collections, including the Schools Outreach Collection and the Asian Art corridor. To Shift a Stone highlights how power shapes what is seen, preserved, and interpreted.
Sophie Mak-Schram says: “Decolonising involves the reorientation of many values and structures that currently oppress most of us. The question is, in the European context, can one decolonise from a colonial centre? Over the past two years, I’ve worked with a range of people to think and make responses to this - to name, change and reimagine structures and values that oppress so many of us.”
Supported by Welsh Government through the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan, Perspective(s) is a pioneering initiative that brings together seven artists to explore the deep and often unspoken connections between Wales and global histories of empire, migration, and resistance.
Perspective(s) is hosted across all seven Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales sites in collaboration with Arts Council of Wales, with each artist shedding light on hidden histories embedded within the national collection.
To Shift a Stone opens on 14 June 2025 at National Museum Cardiff and 13 September at Chapter Arts Centre. It runs until 15 February 2026 at National Museum Cardiff and until 11 January 2026 at Chapter Arts Centre.
Webpage: To Shift a Stone
Sophie Mak-Schram
Sophie Mak-Schram is an artist based between Wales and the Netherlands whose practice spans artistic practice, art historical research and radical pedagogies. They engage others in place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. Sophie draws on personal and shared experiences of cultural difference, coloniality, race and gender.
Often using the metaphor of the 'tool' - as a poetic and practical object - Sophie works with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently.
Currently Sophie is exploring power in and through institutions, working on archival re-imaginings for queer and racial inclusion in the Black Mountain College archives, and (re)defining art and learning collections in the histories of the Amgueddfa Cymru Schools Outreach and Asian art collections.
Recent projects include Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams (2024-2025) in collaboration with Jeanne van Heeswijk at Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Switzerland and Blueprints for Studies (2024) co-curated with Rahel Sphörer at Zeppelin University, Germany. Sophie was Curriculum Redefined Lecturer of Art Pedagogies at the University of Leeds, Research Associate at CCA Derry-Londonderry and Perspective(s) artist between 2024-2025. Sophie is currently Lecturer in Fine Art at Cardiff Metropolitan University and Civic Fellow at BAK Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries.